Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Chocolate Cake

I love chocolate cakes! I realised I said the same thing about egg tarts, fish, cheesecake, kwei lapis & what else... I've got to admit the fact that I love to eat :P Some people just eat to survive, Jerome & I enjoy our food. No wonder Jerome has put on weight... Actually, I'm guilty too :P

Anyway, back to chocolate cakes. I remembered the last time I tried to bake a chocolate cake many years ago, it was a failure. The cake was rock solid after I've chilled it. It was so hard that I almost had to use a chopper to try to cut it. So, sad to say, the cake landed in the bin.

I found a "One Bowl Chocolate Cake" recipe from Allrecipes.It was a 4 1/2 star rating recipe with a lot of favourable reviews. The cake was moist & chocolatety. So I decided to try it out & serve it when my friends came to visit.

I made some adjustments to the ingredients as I wanted to bake a small cake. I poured the batter into a small rectangular cake tin. Unfortunately, I underestimated the expansion & the cake batter overflowed out of the tin halfway through baking. Imagine the mess in the oven as the batter burns away... I had to quickly put in another baking tray to catch the falling batter. I was not looking forward to cleaning up the charred cake batter at the bottom of the oven.

The orignial called for 30 minutes of baking. But when 30 minutes were up, the cake was still very wobbly, so I had to extend the baking time. Checking the cake once a while to check whether it was done. Eventually, the cake took about an hour to be done. The cake came out with a bump & a crack on its top. Initially I had wanted to dust some icing sugar on the cake & serve it plain. However, the huge crack called for a change in plans. The cake needs some make up! So I decided to decorate the cake with some freshcream & strawberries.

Chocolate Cake covered in fresh cream & strawberries

The bottom half of the cake shrunk!

The cake was moist & soft. I'll definitely try baking it again next time in a bigger baking tin.

Adapted Recipe for Chocolate Cake

(makes 1 8-inch round cake)

Ingredients:

(A)

160g sugar

90g all purpose flour

25g cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

(B)

1 egg

100ml milk

50ml vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla essence

100ml boiling water

Method:

1) Preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius.

2) Mix all the ingredients in (A) in a mixing bowl.

3) Add (B) & mix on medium speed till ingredients are well combined.

4) Stir in the boiling water last. The batter will be thin.

5) Pour batter into a greased baking tin & bake for an hr or till the skewer comes out clean.

(The original recipe states baking time to be 30mins, but I needed an hr.)

6) Allow cake to cool in cake pan for 10 minutes before cooling on rack.